If North America was a fictional world in a sci-fi picture, and we saw the people eating food sprayed with poison, we’d know that it’s not a good idea. But when asked to pay a dollar for an organic lemon, we will fiercely defend the belief that we are entitled to an abundance of inexpensive food.

I’m no proselytizer for organic produce, but if we could afford to we’d all choose not to eat pesticides.

Potsothy Sallapa, or “Produce Pots” as he is known around Kensington market, operates an organic grocery where I buy lettuce for my morning salads. At least once a week I want to throttle him. For Pots, his employees and the collection of beatniks that frequent the store, it is a community hangout. He’s constantly giving things away, as if it weren’t a business. When I just want to buy a head of the neighbourhood’s best broccoli, I don’t need to meet the people ahead of me in the queue, or hear about their yoga-drumming-Wiccan-retreat.

Mostly I’ve stopped complaining about him closing down the shop for three weeks in August, during the height of Ontario’s harvest season, so he and his customers can support farmers markets. At least it provides an opportunity to have him over for dinner.

We start with plates of ripe Ontario tomatoes streaked with sour cream and beef fat, rendered from tonight’s barbecued ribs. With my last bite of tomato I learn how pasty tallow gets at room temperature. It’s going to taste terrible by the time Pots has told his story and resumes eating.

“I’m born on the farm,” he begins. I’ll preserve his broken English because it’s part of his charm, along with the rolled Rs of his Sri Lankan accent. “We have no machinery so everything done manually. We plow the land with bulls.”

Though it’s easy to treat him as a caricature, a sandalled hippie and vegetable impresario, I’ve always been curious about where he comes from and what motivates him. But I never had the excuse to ask, until we sat down to dinner.

“In early 70s, late 60s, the pesticides came and we started to spray. We have no idea what the bottle say. We are peasants and farm workers.”

After spraying their tomato field, insects weren’t a problem and the tomatoes grew bigger than ever.

“We got two of the six-gallon tanks, like a backpack, and a spray. And I go farm to farm. I made a job out of that. I was thirteen.” He’d go through twenty tanks a day, earning forty rupees.

“I have no idea what it’s do. Chilies and peppers are very hard to grow without pesticide. So I sprayed.” A farming supply company showed his village a video, with no subtitles, demonstrating how to spray. “The chickens and birds they come to eat the dead bugs on the ground and then fly away. Half of the way they fall down and die. I have no concept. No connection between the two. And I never thought it’s going to kill me one day. Twenty-eight years later, it’s caught up with me.”

Ten years ago a doctor told him he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He asked if Pots had ever worked with pesticides. “I said yeah, I sprayed pesticides like nobody’s business.”

He refused chemotherapy, left his job, pursued homeopathic treatment and opened up the shop, 4 Life Natural Organics. He credits clean living as the reason why he’s alive and his older brother isn’t.

“Maybe six or seven years ago he still was doing the farm. He was spraying for the onion field and then lunchtime he take a nap. And he didn’t wake up.”

None of this is said in a sombre tone. Everything comes with a smile. “Don’t make a big fuss,” he’d told his friends when he thought he was dying. “If I’m dead, just take me and burn me.”

Things get more upbeat as I deposit a beef rib, weighing close to a pound, in front of each guest.

Pots gnaws on the bone as he tells us about a neighbourhood house he’s bought, with plans to turn it into some sort of group home for his friends and their children.

“I didn’t come into this world with anything, and I’m going with an empty hand,” he shrugs. “So this all just for time being.”

For dessert, he brings a basket of peaches from a friends’ farm.

Having eaten a half dozen a day for two weeks, I thought I’d tasted good peaches. But I swear to Zeus, beyond the fact that this fruit won’t kill me, these are the best peaches I’ve ever tasted.

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